Input in a modern world - input methods and multitouch

This talk will cover two topics, input methods and multitouch support. Input methods are a particularly ill-understood, but hugely important, part of the X input system. Any input more complex than 'this key produces this symbol', such as Compose keys or phonetic input for Asian languages, is handled by client-side support code. This talk will give an overview of input methods in X, going through the standard protocol as well as some popular implementations, along with some ideas for future work.

Multitouch support is a hugely attractive buzzword for many devices and form factors. Multitouch support claims to allow for intuitive interactions but so far has largely been limited to custom implementations. With the upcoming X Server 1.12 release, we now have generic multitouch support alongside traditional pointer/keyboard input. This talk will explain the fundamental principles, new event types and how the server behaves when multitouch input devices are present.